A Witch's Guide to Muggle Cookbooks
by Lowlands Girl
Summary: [Pre OotP] The same folks who brought you One Minute Feasts It's Magic! and The Home Compendium of Cooking Charms now introduce: The Witch's Guide to Muggle Cookbooks. Everything you ever needed to know about translating Muggle recipes!


The same folks who brought you _One Minute Feasts - It's Magic!_ and _The Home Compendium of Cooking Charms_ now introduce:

_The Witch's Guide to Muggle Cookbooks_

Have you ever been browsing in a Muggle bookstore and found your eyes traveling wistfully to their cookbooks, only to find that, when you open the books, it might as well be written in Mermish? Or have you ever had a Muggle friend give you a recipe, but you can't follow it when you bring it home?

Never fear!

_The Witch's Guide for Reading Muggle Cookbooks_ solves this problem for you! We've taken several of the most popular Muggle recipes and compiled them in their original form, along with helpful translations. We feel that a suitably skilled witch (or wizard!) should be able, once practicing on a variety of our recipes, to translate any recipe to her (or his) satisfaction!

A few major differences between Muggle and Magical cooking should be mentioned. First, Muggles can't Conjure or Summon their ingredients from the pantry or larder. They have to have them all on hand or in close reach. We've tried making a few of these recipes the Muggle way, and it's rather fun, though tiring, to physically measure out so many cups of flour, or carefully level off a teaspoon of salt. Included in the back is a guide for physical measurement of ingredients, along with sources for such Muggle odds and ends as measuring cups.

Muggles also don't cook over fire. They use _electricity_ and _gas_ to cook their food, which, when passed through various Muggle machines, create heat. However, the best cooks of their world use _gas,_ which can be remarkably close to fire. We urge you to be extra cautious when translating Muggle recipes on your own, since the similarities in cooking can be deceiving!

And with those words of warning, we encourage you to peruse, experiment, and enjoy the fruits (and vegetables, and cookies, and pastas, and meats) of our labour!

Here are some excerpts from our book (currently selling in London, Hogsmeade, New York, and Salem, for sixteen Sickles, twenty-seven Knuts). Enjoy!

**Chocolate Chip Cookies**

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour _(Muggles have several kinds of flour - all-purpose flour, bread flour, pastry flour, wheat flour, whole wheat flour. For this, we recommend using Feast-in-a-Minute's Regular White flour)_

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

1 cup (2 sticks) butter or margarine, softened _(Muggle butter comes in packages of usually four sticks each, with tablespoons and teaspoons marked along the package. Quite ingenious, really, though wasteful with the packaging.)_

3/4 cup granulated sugar _(white sugar)_

3/4 cup packed brown sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract _(We recommend you purchase this at a Muggle grocery store. Don't forget to exchange your Galleons for pounds/dollars/euros! It should only cost a few sickles, but we recommend bringing at least a Galleon in Muggle money. If you wish to prepare your own, see the entry on Flavorful Additions in _One Minute Feasts - It's Magic!

2 large eggs

2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips _(Again, you can find these at a Muggle shop for convenience. Making your own, though, is simple: Use twelve ounces of semi-sweet chocolate - it need not be Honeydukes' best - and a Splintering Charm set for 1 cm pieces. They won't be as uniform as the Muggle kind.)_

Preheat oven to 375 F.

_Muggle ovens take much longer to heat to temperature than ours. If using a standard Cook-Ease oven, allow two or three minutes heating time. For cooking over fire, see below._

Combine flour, baking soda and salt in small bowl.

_This is easy enough!_

Beat butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar and vanilla extract in large mixer bowl until creamy.

_Combine the above ingredients in a bowl and cast the Mixing Charm until creamy - approximately forty-five seconds usually suffices. If your butter is not soft enough, warm it very carefully until it softens._

Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Gradually beat in flour mixture. Stir in chocolate chips. Drop by rounded tablespoon onto ungreased baking sheets.

_Muggles often have to grease - put fats or another slippery substance - on their cooking utensils, to make up for a lack of Permanent Unsticking Charms. However, they have recently discovered a new substance, Teflon, which assists in unsticking. Its longevity is as yet untested._

Bake for 9 to 11 minutes or until golden brown. _If using a standard Cook-Ease oven, baking at 375 should only take four minutes._

For cooking over fire: set the fire to medium heat (about 4.3) and levitate the baking sheets approximately 6 inches above the flames. Cook for ten minutes, making sure that, if you're using more than one cookie sheet, each cookie gets equal heating.

Cool on baking sheets for 2 minutes; remove to wire racks to cool completely. Makes about 5 dozen cookies.

**Risotto**

1 cup risotto rice

3 cups broth, any kind

1/2 onion, roughly chopped _(We recommend a Chopping Charm of the simplest type for onions.)_

1/2 cup parmesan cheese, shredded _(A Splintering Charm should do the trick.)_

3 tbs olive oil

In a large skillet, heat the olive oil over medium heat.

_The directions here are actually simple enough to follow._

Add the onion and cook for five minutes until browned.

Add the rice, stirring well until rice is coated. Add a small amount of broth - 1/4 cup at most, and stir until absorbed. Continue adding small amounts, stirring constantly, until all the broth is used.

_For this step, which takes about an hour for Muggles, we recommend increasing the absorbency of the rice to 5.8 and increasing the heat 84. Be careful that you hit all the grains, else your rice will be lumpy. If you've done it right, you can set the utensils to Self-Utilising, with 1 cup of broth every 6 1/2 minutes. Be sure to stir constantly!_

Add the parmesan cheese; stir until melted.

Serves 4-6.

**Pie Crust**

_Although most housewitches usually learn this one early, we felt it would be an excellent example of how Muggles work._

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 cup shortening, chilled

3 tbs ice water

Mix the flour and salt together in a bowl. Add the shortening. With a pastry blender, _(this is a device with several dull metal "blades" lying parallel each other)_ chop the shortening into the flour mixture until it resembles coarse grain. Sprinkle 2-3 tablespoons of water over the dough, just enough to hold it together, and roll it into a ball. Add water, a sprinkling at a time, until it just holds together. Work quickly.

Roll the dough out onto a floured surface, 1/8 inch thick. Working quickly, transfer the dough into a pie plate. Follow pie recipe for cooking.

_As most witches know, the easiest way to make a pie crust is to combine the flour and salt first, then cast a simple Pie Crust Charm on the dough. Make sure the water in your pantry is clean before using the Pie Crust Charm - you wouldn't want Kelpie droppings in your pumpkin pie!_

We hope you've enjoyed these excerpts. Share them with your friends, or, better yet, get copies of _The Witch's Guide to Muggle Cookbooks_ for all of them!

A/N: Whenever I cook, I spend at least thirty seconds wondering how Mrs. Weasley would do it. And since JKR hasn't yet blessed us with a canon explanation of cooking magic, I decided to have at it. Oh, and if you recognize something, chances are I don't own it, especially if it's from Harry Potter. And the recipes are real. Go ahead, try the Muggle versions!


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